Michael Seidlinger - The Fun We've Had

But he brought her back.

He always brought her back. He was in tears, and so was she. Their’s was a past that could only be told here, after each perished, pardoned themselves from the life they never had.

Too young, maybe, but she reached as far as she could and, she knew him fully, knew him best. He lived twice as long as she but never breathed out once.

Never really blinked. His was a tense life, one full of held back tears and dozens of cries for help.

It was only now, after having borrowed his eyes, that she realized that he held it all back. Much like she was certain that he saw the ugly and the alien, the random grudges and the unneeded hate, that she fled and fought back with apathy, with ignorance.

He had seen all that and still said, “I love you.”

“I love you,” he handed back her eyes.

“I love you,” she gave him back his.

“I love you,” she would rather be blind than be alone.

“I love you,” embedding agreement with the inflection added to the “I” in “I love you.”

He could keep her smile. He gave her enough: He chose not to let go. Eventually they would.

The sea, maybe calm, would soon change. Nothing remained the same, and neither would she, no matter what she did to stay with him.

Seeing with his own eyes, he could pick out a horizon of his choice. It was his to choose, for it was his eyes that would see. He traced the air into partitions and within those partitions he formed invisible pages. Extending a finger, he wrote onto the air and squinted to read what it became.

With his own eyes, he could see and could feel without tears forming; he could feel what little he felt and let it settle. Him and her could feel and soon, as they returned what they had borrowed, they would admit to themselves that this is what they’ve become.

They have met death and will be unable to escape it.

Words propped up like a skyline view in the distance; he observed the sea, waited for the sun to begin to set, before touching her. Sun never set until it was too late, and by the time it did, he discovered what, maybe, she already knew.

He could not touch her without touching himself.

“Are we having fun?” laundered the question of giving her a hand. When she gave, he gave both, gave both of her hands back, and she did the same.

With his calloused and fat fingers, he felt a body, his body, as she felt a body, hers.

This scene does not work.

The romance is clearly off the page.

He wanted to kiss her, but to kiss her, those lips would be so bitter. She reached below but felt his set rather than hers.

To make love was to make love with oneself, masturbation of a stranger duped into becoming you. It was sickening, and even more sickening was how he felt nothing, the severed senses, halved by demise, a demise that continued to loosen his grip, tempting him ceaselessly to just let go, die.

Die. You are dead.

What little he had to hold onto he still held, and never, not even once, did he question whether or not she would let go.

No letting go of each other.

A kiss he couldn’t take back, a kiss meant for her, but she still carried his complexion, and he was still girlish.

Worst of all was how he smelled; his odor on her did not match. It could have never been as wrong as it was here.

Sickness overcame them, and it was horrible to think that only sickness, the ugly of anything, could feel so bold on the wide-open sea. In fact, the sickness, the nausea, the disease felt sharper out here, wherever they were.

He could so easily succumb to it but instead he said, “I love you,” and she said it back.

Nothing laundered, no feeling, no sickness.

It was genuine, a genuine “I love you.”

More, much more than anyone could bargain for, she had returned to herself, felt with her own fingers, grasped with her own hands, and now able to hold back the tears, each feeling, no matter how construed and defeated, held there on the air, for her to see. Those blue eyes of hers could easily forget to blink.

Much like breath, she made a conscious choice to continue, and she continued mostly to be able to continue alongside him.

The coffin is the loneliest place for a person.

But with touch given back to her, she tried and he tried. She felt the sickness on her mouth, and soon she ran to the edge. She could see it so well, his reflection on the water, as she began to pretend to dry heave.

Exchanging “I love you’s” made it better, as perfect as can be. He held her hand and she held his.

No matter how ready they were, the sex eluded them.

It eluded them before, back when they had the heart to feel, the breath to breathe, the sight to savor. It will continue to elude them here.

“Are we having fun?”

It was a question. For once it was a question whose only answer was a definitive silence.

A silence that is left to the reader to determine if theirs was ever anything but poor timing, a poor fit of two similar personalities; everything about them clashed and yet something else made them fit so well.

Nonsense was their own true sense.

“I love you.” She knew what had to be done and signaled, gestured, for him to do the same.

She pulled his face from the borrowed body, the nonsense dripping in dark red onto the coffin, and she gave it to him.

In that instant, she was death incarnate.

She saw it then as he did exactly the same, trailing with another “I love you” that was genuine, as if to imply that he remained only for her, and she took it at face value, believing, really believing, that he would.

She could believe that she would do the same for him, and maybe she would. However, it was deeply written into her to think firstly about herself and if her actions were in any way selfless it was because she was concerned with how the people around her felt about her. She skewed her actions in favor of getting an unfair, overly favorable, judgment.

With her face in her hands, they both held onto their faces, letting the blood red outline how high the invisible water had risen in the coffin.

Soon it would be above the ankle.

She examined the shape of her skull, watched as his eyes scanned his own skull, before they both placed their faces in place.

Underneath their skulls were still borrowed mechanisms, bone ill fitting, but wearing their own faces somehow made it better. Even when their faces hung there, she leaned in and said, “I love you.” They kissed and she considered again the sex that she craved.

Sundown. He played with language on the air, letting the lines he loved most highlight the horizon. He had accepted the fact that he would be unable to share this with her and, quite possibly, she had something that she would be unable to share with him.

They occupied the coffin, wondering and waiting for the coffin to sink.

But it wouldn’t sink.

Ciphers clipped their conversation into hardly felt statements, but somehow it felt like forever ago when they traded hands and eyes, scent and faces, when really it could very well have been a mere moment ago.

Sense of time draped the bottommost depths of the sea much like nonsense framed every single aspect of their meeting and subsequent, short-lived, relationship. If it could be called that.

But he loved the words that seemed to answer and prove what he felt.

The study had been right, the study of death during life was his plight and even now he looked to prove that it was not a waste, when perhaps everything that uses life can be wagered and ranked in as possible waste.

No wasted “I love you’s,” for every so often it will be his turn to say “I love you” and it would result in a return to anger if either failed to give reply.